MARIUPOL, UKRAINE ¨C The two men crouched in the shade of a tree. The ballot papers they were accused of forging lay on the front of their Russian-made Moskvich car, stopped and searched by Ukrainian soldiers on the outskirts of the port city of Mariupol, in the country¡¯s rebel southeast.
¡°This is how they did it in Crimea,¡± said Warrant Officer Timofey Rudyak, who, like the other soldiers had been sent 750 km (500 miles) from the capital, Kiev, to restore order to the country¡¯s industrial heartland.
Rudyak, 35, said the several hundred ballots, bound in white paper and almost all ticked ¡°yes,¡± had been intercepted a little over an hour after voting began in a referendum on self-rule; a vote dismissed by Ukraine¡¯s government and its Western backers as a sham, a repeat of the vote that saw the Crimean Peninsula annexed by Russia in March.
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